Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

by Joyelle McSweeney

Fiction. "One would not make love to a Salamandrine during a sandstorm," wrote Aleister Crowley, anticipating by some sixty years the note of caution that Tarpaulin Sky must attach to the Black Book whose image now burns before you: Dear Reader, banish all received notions of narrative, of language itself. Masquerading as a collection of short stories, SALAMANDRINE is a channeled text, moonchild, unholy offspring of poetry and Loser Occult. Refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood, Salamandrine renders impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. SALAMANDRINE is the high magick of art so low it crawls. Like a toddler at a poetry reading. With a taste for achilles heels. Hell-bent on bringing literature itself to its knees."If you would recover the empire over the Salamanders, purify and exalt the Natural Fire that is within you."----Abbe de Villars"He who shrinks from the flames will never command Salamanders."--Arthur Edward Waite

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2013

About the author

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning an MPhil from Oxford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

With Johannes Göransson, McSweeney founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe, including such major authors as Hiromi Itō, Kim Hyesoon, Aase Berg and Raul Zurita. Action Books seeks to move poetry and poetics from other literary cultures into the center of US poetry discussions and undermine the nationalist rubrics under which literature is marketed and discussed. In addition to the University of Notre Dame, McSweeney has taught in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and as a Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting for a lot of reasons. Highlights are the title story "Salamandrine, My Kid" and (probably my favorite) "Mothers Over Lambs", which is also surprisingly funny. I'm pretty convinced after reading this book that McSweeney (rather than Guy Davenport, who I usually give as an example) is the last modernist, and I mean that in the best way possible. Review/essay on elements of McSweeney's technique coming soon at Mixer Publishing.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've bumped this up to five stars since my initial rating. It's an amazingly awesome collection.

My interview with Joyelle at Monkeybicycle.

[Helen McClory]

A complex swirling sort of book, the kind of thing you take nearly a month to read and it still isn't slow enough to take it all in. Phew!